The Sandbeach People and dugong hunters of Eastern Cape York Peninsula: property in land and sea country

Abstract

Thomson (1933:457) described the Sandbeach People of eastern Cape York Peninsula as ‘a very distinct type of Australian [A]borigine ... essentially fishermen and dugong hunters, and ... often great seafarers ... skilled canoe builders and navigators ... [who] make adventurous voyages among the coral reefs and sand banks of the Great Barrier Reef, in search of dugong and turtle, and the eggs of turtles and sea birds’. Thomson (1933, 1934) made much of their marine orientation and he wrote of their outrigger canoes, harpoon technology and beach-based camps in which they spent much of the annual seasonal round. In their indigenous languages, they indeed describe themselves with phrases such as Umpila pama malngkanichi and Uuk-Umpithamu ma-yaandhimunu ‘people who own the sandbeach’. 1Thomson (1934:238) noted that their homelands extended from ‘the shallow waters of Princess Charlotte Bay almost to Cape York’, and he (Thomson 1933:458, 1934:237) identified them as the tribes2 which he called ‘the

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